Your Obedient Serpent

The Circle is Complete

During much of my childhood in the 1970s, KTLA in Los Angeles aired reruns of Star Trekon weekend afternoons ... unless it was baseball season.

The original run of Battlestar Galacticaaired on ABC, on Sunday nights ... where it was regularly yet unpredictably preempted by football. (The erratic schedule probably contirbuted to the poor ratings; the people who wantedto watch it never knew when it would acutally be on,and in those pre-Internet days, it was not uncommon to discover on Monday morning that the damned show had actually aired when it should have.)

Yesterday, during the Super Bowl ... I watched reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, first on BBC America, then on NetFlix.

IIRC, BSG's ratings actually were pretty decent. It was the huge cost of the show, (probably the most expensive series per episode until Star Trek TNG came along) that caused ABC to cancel it. Had it been a mini series, it would have been thought of as a success.

Of course, by the time they realized maybe they shouldn't have been so hasty, and wanted to bring it back, we got Galactica 1980 instead.

I do recall the three hour debut being interrupted by news coverage of President Carter brokering a peace treaty, which pushed back the rest of the show until nearly midnight on the East Coast, much to my parents' annoyance. ;)

I know that Imissed more than one episode of the original run of BSGthanks to sports and random variety show specials featuring now-forgotten celebrities preempting the show so regularly that i just lost track of its rate appearances in its supposed tune slot.

I have always assumed that the same thing happened to some of the Nielsen families who might otherwise have tuned in.

Were you on the West Coast at the time? That might explain all the sports preemptions. I have no memory of BSG being regularly bumped, but I do recall the Logan's Run series getting messed up by football more than once.

When I lived in New Jersey, the local NBC affiliate would bump Buck Rogers for local programming all the time. There were a couple other shows they didn't air at all, and those ended up on a UHF station, which was harder to tune in if you didn't have cable. ;)